Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois

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Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois

The Russian Cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois ( French Cimetière russe , also Cimetière de Liers ) is a cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois , a southern suburb of the French capital Paris .

General

Church of the Assumption of Our Lady

Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois is part of the Arrondissement Palaiseau des Départements Essonne and is located about 25 kilometers from Paris city center. The cemetery is there on the western edge of the communal forest (Forêt Communale) on Rue Léo Lagrange.

The story of the Russian cemetery begins in the nearby Château de la Cossonnerie, the main building of an 18th-century farm that was expanded in the 19th century. White emigrants who had left Russia or the Soviet Union after the October Revolution of 1917 settled here in 1926 . A little later, the building was acquired by the English nobleman and philanthropist Dorothy Wyndham Paget (1905–1960), who had become aware of the fate and living conditions of the emigrants through acquaintance with the Meschtschorski family. Paget set up a retirement home for Russian emigrants in the château . As a result, part of the community cemetery, which had existed since 1879, was purchased. The first deceased emigrant was buried here in 1927; Regular funerals took place from 1929.

Around 15,000 people were buried in 5220 graves in the cemetery. Today there are no further funerals due to lack of space.

In 2008 the Russian state paid off the private debts of almost 700,000 euros of the owners of 648 graves in the cemetery in order to preserve them.

church

The Russian Orthodox Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (French Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption ; Russian Успенская церковь / Uspenskaja zerkow ) of the cemetery was built from 1938 in the Novgorod style of the 15th century according to designs by the architect and painter Albert Benua , who together with his wife Margarita also painted the frescoes in the church. The consecration of the church took place on 14 October 1939th

The cemetery and church have been classified as an ensemble that is unique in France and "the world's largest Russian emigrant cemetery" since 2006 as a " Monument historique ".

Literature and music

The Russian writer Marina Judenitsch (* 1959; distant relatives of the white general and emigrant Nikolai Judenitsch , 1862–1933) wrote her best-known novel Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in 1999 . As early as the 1970s, the Soviet poet Robert Roschdestwenski (1932–1994) wrote a poem of the same name that was later set to music and sung by Alexander Malinin . There are also songs on this topic by Russian songwriters of different generations, such as Alexander Gorodnizki (* 1933) and Sergei Trofimow (* 1966).

Graves of prominent people

Ivan Bunin's tomb
Grave of Sinaida Hippius and Dmitri Mereschkowski
Grave of Rudolf Nureyev
Grave of Andrei Tarkowski and his wife Larissa

Former graves

Some of those buried in the cemetery have been reburied in Russia in recent years, for example the writer Iwan Schmeljow (1873–1950) and the composer and conductor Nikolai Tscherepnin (1873–1945), both in Moscow's Donskoy cemetery .

Memorial stones

Tomb of the veterans of General Drosdowski

There are also various memorial stones in the cemetery, mainly for members of the military. These include monuments in memory of Gallipoli , where in military camps, a large part of the beaten white 1920/21 Wrangel was staying -Armee for which the Russian Civil War fallen Don Cossacks and members of the Russian Cadet Corps , for the white generals Mikhail Alekseyev (1857-1918) and Michail Drosdowski (1881–1919) as well as a cenotaph for General Alexander Kutepow (1882–1930) who was kidnapped by Soviet agents and killed under unknown circumstances .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Buried near Paris in Rossijskaja Gaseta , January 17, 2008 (Russian)
  2. ↑ Entry in the Base Mérimée (French)
  3. ↑ Panin on the GULAG website of Memorial Deutschland e. V.

Web links

Commons : Russian Cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 48 ° 37 '53 "  N , 2 ° 20' 43"  E